Recently, I had to go away for a while; I had to “get off the grid.” As the full-time, daytime caregiver for our 5-month-old daughter, as she learns what life is all about, it’s my job to make sure it doesn’t kill her. For the past week, she’s been going through a sort of Renaissance; not just a physical growth spurt, but a mental and emotional spurt as well. Managing this time is like trying to wean a werewolf off of painkillers. Breaking an addiction to painkillers is hard enough, but then there’s the whole werewolf thing.
And right now, she is a werewolf. The changes happening to her body are no less profound. The sleeper that fit perfectly last night has become tight enough for her to wear out clubbing tomorrow night.
In addition to the physical changes, she’s now able to communicate emotionally. She can let me know when she’s happy, sad, angry, etc. but she seems to have no control over them. They just appear in rapid and random succession at varying degrees of volume and intensity. It’s like what happens to your television channels when you accidentally sit on the remote control. Just the other day, she didn’t want to be held and she didn’t want to be put down, so she decided to scream at me until I came up with a third option.
She’s also learning to move. When I lay her down in her crib for her “nap,” often, within two minutes, I will hear whining and grunting. When I check on her, she has wriggled her way to the most remote corner of the crib, and contorted herself into a position not seen outside of Cirque de Soleil’s Saltimbanco.
Mentally, she’s quickly learning cause and effect, and which buttons to push to bend daddy to her primitive will. Many is the time that I look up and, from behind the mesh of her play pen, she’ll be staring at me intently like celebrity magician David Blaine taking an eye exam. “What?” I’ll say, “What?!” A smirk will cross her lips, and she’ll eventually go back to hitting herself in the eye with a teething ring.
There was no warning. None of the myriad baby books ever mentioned the possibility of this perfect storm of growth. Strangely, no one has yet written “What You’ll Never Expect When You’re Expecting.” No one ever said: “In rare cases, you may enter the baby’s room to find her hovering above her crib, speaking a dead Sumerian dialect, and shooting lasers out of her eyes. Try soothing her by holding her while bouncing on an exercise ball.” (Which is their solution to everything. Colic? Exercise ball. Diaper rash? Exercise ball. Possessed by demons? Exercise ball.)
It’s all part of growing up, I guess. Obviously, she’s really not a werewolf; she’s just a baby. However, based on the alarming number of dead birds that I’ve found in her crib lately, I think she’s ready to start solid food.
